Infinite Life

by Annie Baker

'I said no one should ever try to recreate this. This is agony in its purest form.'

Five women in Northern California lie outside on chaises longues and philosophise. But can you ever communicate what it feels like to be inside your own body?

Infinite Life is a surprisingly funny inquiry into the complexity of suffering, and what it means to desire in a body that’s failing. It was first produced in a co-production between the National Theatre, London, and Atlantic Theater Company, New York, and performed at both theatres in 2023, directed by James Macdonald.

Genres: Plays

64 pages, Paperback

Published November 30, 2023

About the author

Baker grew up in Amherst, Mass., and graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She earned her MFA from Brooklyn College.

Her play Body Awareness was staged off-Broadway by the Atlantic Theater Company in May and June 2008. The play featured JoBeth Williams and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award. Circle Mirror Transformation premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in October 2009 and received Obie Awards for Best New American Play and Performance, Ensemble. Her play The Aliens, which premiered off-Broadway at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in April 2010, was a finalist for the 2010 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and shared the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play with Circle Mirror Transformation.

Baker's adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya premiered at the Soho Repertory Theatre in June 2012 and was called a "funky, fresh new production" by a New York Times reviewer. Her play The Flick premiered at Playwrights Horizons in March 2013. A New York Times reviewer wrote, "Ms. Baker, one of the freshest and most talented dramatists to emerge Off Broadway in the past decade, writes with tenderness and keen insight." The play received the Obie Award for Playwriting in 2013.

Baker teaches in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. She was one of seven playwrights selected to participate in the 2008 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab. In 2011 she was named a Fellow of United States Artists.

Reviews

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A play about living with chronic pain and being horny and getting turned on hearing about a sexy stranger’s colonoscopy. Story of my LIFE and maybe the most I’ve laughed at an Annie Baker play (and I’ve officially read them all!) (my Annie lending library is always open to friends)

[deats]

"if pain doesn’t mean anything, it’s so boring. but if it means anything at all then i don’t know if i can bear it."

"pete who are the normal happy people? they're out there. they're buying bread."

play journal week #2

infinite life: co-pro between the national theatre (london) and atlantic theatre company (nyc). first went up at linda gross in nyc aug 2023, moved to dorfman nov 2023. (is it comforting, bleak, or just funny that fuckin everybody's doing co-pros now?)

felt more aligned with john (2015) than the flick or the aliens, which makes sense. like john, i didn't initially connect with it quite as much as i did those two. but i think seeing it staged would change that for me. one reviewer compared this to waiting for godot, which is kind of badass and helped me re-contextualize. i think the way baker writes her lead women (fairly consistently horny, unfaithful, assholey anti-heroines) is kinda fascinating. i also think one of the greatest contemporary playwrights of our time crafting a piece with five meaty roles, all for women over 40 (but most for women over 60), is cool as fuck. hope to catch this onstage one day and reassess

[Kat Kuo · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the best fictional accounts of women’s health / pain / bodily anxieties I have ever read. I srsly marvel at the way that Annie baker manages to capture the secrecy and shame that ppl feel about normal, mundane parts of their lives without compromising dramatic tension. I looovveeddd this

[Jasey Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one feels like an expansion of some issues Baker was working through in John, but also feels like entirely new territory and completely its own thing. I hope to God I can see the next Annie Baker play in person

[Annabel Holland · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning, the play adaptation was v true to this, didn’t realise how much it was about books until I read it

[Fiona W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it crazy if I say this is my new favorite AB play? It’s so funny. Like I was laughing out loud so much Sam thought I was crazy.

[nashaly · Rating 3 out of 5]

"pete who are the normal happy people? they're out there. they're buying bread." this quote kinda hurt but really this play is all about chronic pain and being horny in your 40s.

[Jonathan May · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pain makes us the ultimate strangers to ourselves.

[Harry McDonald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicate, deliberate, deeply strange.

[lucy walter · Rating 3 out of 5]

i just don’t know what to think?? i thought it was kind of an afterlife thing at first but now i’m more confused. i will say that i connected to this when it came to talking about the pain in your body and it being constant or hard to describe.

“i always feel like i’m lying when i say i’m in pain.”

[Noelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

what is a body

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annie Baker remains one of our most compelling contemporary playwrights, and her latest work is no exception. She has an unerring instinct for creating characters who are quirky, yet 100% realistic and fascinating. Here, she follows five (mostly elderly) women and one man who are spending time at a wellness retreat in Northern California, all dealing with various forms of chronic pain. Over the course of the play we come to know each of them deeply, and discover not only their most intimate idiosyncrasies, but their common humanity - stirring, superb stuff.

My only minor quibble is that through most of the play, at the end of each scene a character breaks the 4th wall to announce how much time has passed till the following one - which somewhat breaks the realism and isn't strictly necessary; but she notably drops that conceit for the final few scenes.

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/202...
https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/th...
https://www.timeout.com/london/theatr...
https://www.vulture.com/2023/09/theat...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/infinite...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/12/th...

[MattThatReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another play that I think suffers from what I’m gonna christen ‘to be seen syndrome’, which again is the paradox that every single play we read lives in, because if we see them as pieces of text we are never truly consuming them in the medium they are meant for. I will try to articulate my thoughts regardless, but I feel like this disclaimer needs to be put in bright neon lights before every play I review.

5 women (and occasionally one man) attend a wellness retreat in America, all suffering from various forms of chronic illnesses/pain and/or life threatening diseases. In this confinement and close proximity to one another, they begin to divulge to one another what it is like to be in their bodies as women, talk about their sex lives and philosophy amongst other things.

Intention wise, I feel Baker was trying to explore the lengths women will go through in order to make themselves well, particularly in contract to the expectations of the often superficial pressures society places on women, even amongst themselves.

However I am willing to say this play has gone over my head somewhat I am unsure what was the message here. It read well, with wit and humour throughout, blah blah blah whatever I could go on, basically I didn’t really get it and that’s ok.

[kaitlyn]

There’s something about an Annie Baker play that is soft and gentle, yet simultaneously is the most cutting and precise work. This particular play isolates such a particular facet of human existence in such a brilliant way. (Saying it here for posterity but I’d love to direct a site specific version of this play. But if I don’t, someone else should. Let’s hear the wheels of the suitcase roll away on the gravel until they truly disappear.)
~
Content transparency for this play below as it did color my reading of it (things are tricky!): This play traffics heavily in intricate descriptions of chronic pain and eating / fasting, medical procedures and conditions, as well as descriptions of sexual acts and encounters. All of the characters are fasting during the play, with one character in a juice fast. Characters are depicted during states of enduring physical pain related to their chronic pain. There are also people talking about their sexual desires in intimate details, but also talking about their chronic pain and how it feels. There is one scene where they use a story about the rape of a young girl to lead a philosophical discussion, perhaps for a page or two.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable but not what I expected. Diving into what pain feels like and how unmeasurable it truly is was an interesting storyline.
Also - unexpected (bizarre) sexual turns I did not see coming. I’ll never look at tortilla chips in the same way. Not so much the sweet old ladies lying on a chaises longues that I visualised. Nevertheless, enjoyable.

[Rubadingyrapids · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully real, subtle glimpses into the pain of the individual. The whole point being that no one can ever know how it feels to be in another persons body.

"if pain doesn’t mean anything, it’s so boring. but if it means anything at all then i don’t know if i can bear it."

[Joel Wall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baker presents us with a series of flawed and complex characters to without judgement but with compassion as we consider how they got to this point in their lives.

[Mr T · Rating 5 out of 5]

She does it again!

[Jaden Urso · Rating 5 out of 5]

too real 🫣

[Harry Balden]

Feel quite angry at the people who told me this was good

[Kyra M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can you think of a better premise than five women reclining on the lawn chairs out back?

[Rhea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like most plays it was better read aloud with a group of actors, and it was better the second time I read it. Some really deep material about chronic health, but also a lot of humor! Lovely ending.

[Lucy Jennifer Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

not the best for monologues, unless you're 45 over ...

[Semi-Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Play Review: Read this as a double bill with The Antipodes. I liked this one much better. The business of dying is one of those things that pervades all media. As a horror enthusiast those deaths are often scandalous and gory. For me the epitome of realistic death portrayals can only be The Body Season 5 Episode 16 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you haven’t seen Buffy because it’s too corny or whatever ironic reason you’re denying yourself this jewel of a show, do yourself a favour and watch that episode, (only if you’re in a good place with your grief).

Although it’s not Buffy this play does a gorgeous job of taking the sensationalism out of dying. Exploring not just dying but illness and pain by juxtapositioning the unglamorous nature of life and placing it at a posh luxury wellness retreat. Most of the characters are zany mature (sixty plus) women and one woman and one man in their thirties. A brief foray into a heated sexual interest between the younger characters is interesting but for me was merely a footnote. The main course is simply just characters telling their stories.

All of the characters are enduring voluntary starvation through juice fasts and cleanses to rid them of their ailments. To distract from their hunger all they can do is talk about their lives, and the past and their hopeful futures. Like an AA meeting this book shines because its structure gives no room for any massive dramas or tension, all there is space for is straight up storytelling and I loved it.